St. Bernard’s: Terrors of the Light in the Gothic Hospital

Abstract

When readers imagine medical experimentation in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, they are likely to think of the scientist working in an isolated lab––a Dr. Frankenstein, a Jekyll, or a Moreau. One might expect the same in Edward Berdoe’s novel St. Bernard’s: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887), which Keir Waddington has recently called a “hybrid Gothic novel” (258). In fact, the narrative does depict familiar images of the sequestered medical man: scientists vivisecting dogs in the institution’s vaults; a physiologist working in his domestic lab to find poisonous mushrooms that will kill his invalid wife without a trace. However, it primarily depicts terror within the very public space of teaching hospital wards. Exciting horror via the Gothic tropes of secret villainy and startling revelations arguably poses a challenge for the author when the outrages in question occur in plain view; and, indeed, the multiple generic strands in the novel suggest a writer grasping for a form of representation that trades in the mystery of the Gothic yet employs the detailed, documentary perspective of a social problem novel. I suggest that the text seeks to resolve this difficulty via a reconfiguration of Gothic spaces. That is, it progressively redefines the dungeon from physical location to residing in the psyche of the hospital clinician. Governed by professional incentives that only a fellow doctor knows, Berdoe’s medical researcher becomes trapped by his inability to feel as he ignores the suffering of his current patients in order to make the great discovery that will assure his and the hospital’s reputation. This interiorization of the dungeon is but one of the ways in which the novel invokes yet reconfigures classic Gothic spatiality and landscapes. Ultimately, St. Bernard’s suggests that readers must rethink how Gothic medicine works if they are to reform hospital care.